1—
Introduction:
Representation and Its Discontents

It is characteristic of philosophical writing that at every turn it must confront the question of representation anew.
Walter Benjamin,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin's opening lines in the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The origin of German tragic drama) is a clear echo of the critical problem that informed the intellectual life of the early years of German Romanticism, known as the Frühromantik, a brief yet revolutionary period of literary activity that revolved around the journal Athenäum published during the years 1798–1800 in Jena. The founders of the journal were two brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. In the course of their literary careers, the Schlegels published three more journals: Europa (1803–1805), Deutsches Museum (1812–1813), and Concordia (1820–1823).^[1] Both brothers were accomplished classical philologists and translators. They and August Wilhelm's wife, Caroline, were later joined by Friedrich's wife, Dorothea, poet-philosopher Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), writer Ludwig Tieck, theologian-philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, and philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Schelling actually never published in the journal but was interested in Caroline, whom he married shortly after the group disbanded.^[2] Such dangerous liaisons or extracurricular activities of the Athenäum circle become the butt of Heinrich Heine's relentless jokes in his long essay Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School), an amusing and thought-provoking critique of German Romanticism. But that is the subject of another story.

Though not strictly a movement or a school, Jena Romanticism represents a prescient critical consciousness that has found forceful expression in contemporary literary theory. The work of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis is informed by a strong interest in the philosophical, moral, aesthetic, and social implications of the problem of representation. The theoretical imagination of Jena Romanticism

was not laid to rest with the Athenäum . Schlegel and Novalis carried out their mission of establishing literature's critical foundation with unabated passion until the end of their lives. Schlegel's following tribute to Novalis bears testimony to the intellectual affinity and compatibility of the two writers and to their close cooperation in the critical ventures of German Romanticism:

You don't dwell on the boundaries; rather your soul is deeply steeped in poetry and philosophy. It was closest to me in these images of uncomprehended truth. What you've thought I think; what I've thought you will think or have already thought. There are misunderstandings that confirm anew the greatest shared understanding. Every doctrine of the eternal Orient belongs to all artists. I name you instead of the others. (1958, 2: 272, no. 156)

The ramifications of the Athenäum project extend well into Friedrich Nietzsche's work and beyond. The journal envisioned its intellectual task to be re-presenting representation, in other words, recasting narrative accounts of philosophy, history, literature, and art in terms of their present or modern configuration. The critical attention of the Athenäum encompassed a set of interrelated questions on the nature of literary and philosophical representation which had challenged major thinkers since the days of the pre-Socratic philosophers. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy state in the preface to L'absolu littéraire (The literary absolute), the Athenäum does not claim to represent a rupture: "It makes no pretense of starting out with a tabula rasa or of ringing in the new. It sees itself, much to the contrary, as a commitment to the critical 'recasting' of what is" (1988, 10).

Indeed, the early Romantics lay no claim to the originality of their critical formulations. In fragment 110 of the Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel states: "It is a sublime taste always to prefer things that have been raised to the second power. For example, reproductions of imitations, critiques of reviews, postscripts to addenda, commentaries on notes" (1958, 2: 181). The accreditation of copy, repetition, imitation, or intertextuality poses a radical challenge to the humanist notions of originality and authenticity. It is interesting that many contemporary works of art and literature defy these concepts in their deliberate use of copies, collages, parodies, and intertexts. Although the Romantics, with their usual ironic disposition, declined to accept credit for critical innovation, the conceptual

paradigms they deployed as a result of the fragmentation, revision, and configuration of previous texts have radically changed the ways of reading and writing literary history. In the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "our 'modernity,' " does not cease to "use romanticism as a foil," tirelessly reinventing its central concepts. "What interests us in romanticism," they state, "is that we still belong to the era it opened up" (ibid., 15). The unfinished critical agenda of Jena Romanticism is, indeed, frequently discussed, alluded to, or paraphrased in the work of contemporary literary theorists. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy describe the Jena "project" as "that brief, intense, and brilliant moment of writing (not quite two years and hundreds of pages) that by itself opens an entire era, but exhausts itself in its inability to grasp its own essence and aim—and that will ultimately find no other definition than a place (Jena) and a journal (the Athenäum )" (ibid., 7).

Even a brief glance at the pages of the Athenäum readily reveals that its contributors addressed, in one way or another, every critical question literature could imagine. They never attempted, however, to fully answer these questions. On the contrary, their writings sustain our interest today probably because they maintain an unresolved critical tension. This tension results, as Schlegel implies, from the awareness of the impossibility of representing the absolute:

Once one becomes infatuated with the absolute and simply can't escape it, then the only way out is to constantly contradict oneself and unite opposite extremes. The principle of contradiction is inevitably doomed, and one only has the choice of either suffering from it or else ennobling necessity by acknowledging its status as free action.(1958, 2: 164, no. 26)^[3]

The possibility of "free action" implies freely motivated representation that is only possible in the realm of art and which a belief in the availability of truth or being would exclude. Clearly positioning themselves against the representational conceit of philosophy and the noncontradiction rules of logic, the Romantics demonstrate that the critical adventure of art and literature thrives on moments of discontinuity, rupture, and reversal.

True to the spirit of Romanticism's interest in copies, commentaries, and intertexts, I would like to start my investigation with a quote that is several times removed from its original source. In Les mots et les choses (The order of things), Michel Foucault writes

that this book was conceived in a burst of laughter triggered off by a passage in a work by Jorge Luis Borges which, in turn, was a reference to a Chinese encyclopedia that classifies animals as " '(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.' " This amusing taxonomy, which so markedly differs from all our known conventions of classification, this "exotic charm of another system of thought" makes us immediately realize "the limitation of our own [thought], the stark impossibility of thinking that " (1970, xv). The realization of "the stark impossibility of thinking that," in other words, the awareness of difference and the recognition of otherness, often coincide in intellectual and literary history with a heightened perception of a crisis in representation.

The problem of representation is inherent to the never fully answered question of how philosophical or literary language can mediate and account for the world of experience and for concepts. That question pursues the ideal correspondence of object to subject, word to meaning, image to concept. Representation always aims to make the subject or presence present to itself. It strives to present concepts of presence, identity, and being in their totality. However, if it were to achieve its objective completely it would negate itself, for then it would become the object represented. If representation is to re-present presence, it can only do so in a formal or material way, that is, through the mediation of synthetic or constructed entities, such as words, symbols, and images. These constructs are not what they represent. Thus, representation always involves the duplication or presentation of an object or a concept by means of something that it is not, which also means that representation begins with a duplication or repetition of identity. The form of this repetition, however, is difference, that is, a split in subjectivity and identity. Since representation can never fully recover presence or coincide ideally with it, it will always pursue strategies to cover absence. "Instead of presenting presence," any attempt at mimetic representation "testifies to absence by tracing and retracing ever elusive presence" (Taylor 1984, 82). The recognition that some primary presence or truth remains inaccessible to consciousness lies at the heart of the problem of representation.

The uneasy confrontation with the impossibility of knowing the truth, hidden in some other—be it the noumenal world, a forgotten time, or an occulted code—creates an intellectual anxiety during periods poised on the thresholds of revolutionary change. As Foucault has observed, the definite transition to modernity was marked "when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things" (1970, 304). The social and political upheaval generated by the French Revolution was paralleled by a relentless search for the understanding of the conditions and limits of human reason, by the praxis of critique introduced by Immanuel Kant. Kant's critical philosophy represents, in his own words, "a new Copernican revolution" by placing the human mind at the center of all operations of knowledge. It is impossible to ascertain, however, whether the cognitive powers with which the human subject is equipped can represent things as they "really" are. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the thing as it is synthesized by a priori forms of intuition and the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich ). The thing-in-itself is not accessible by the faculties and forms a limit to human knowledge. The implications of the Kantian problem of representation that gave rise to Romanticism's speculative idealism will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

Here I would like to explore the extent to which the critical discourse of the Frühromantik —as articulated in the works of its major theorists, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis—constitutes a response to the problem of representation that acquired renewed currency in the aftermath of the revolution in German Idealism. The crisis of representation, witnessed in the radical shift from poetic mimesis to critical poiesis during the late eighteenth century, corresponds to the profound socio-political, economic, cultural, and moral crises that accompanied the French Revolution. These crises are not the direct object of my study; however, their traces are unmistakable in the work of the early Romantics. History and the history of philosophy constitute the condition and context of literature. "The French Revolution, Fichte's philosophy, and Goethe's Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age," writes Schlegel in the Athenäum, adding:

Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition, whoever cannot take any revolution seriously that isn't noisy and materialistic, has not yet achieved

a lofty, broad perspective on the history of humanity. Even in our inadequate cultural histories—which usually resemble a collection of variants accompanied by a continuous commentary for which the classical text was lost—many a little book, scarcely noticed by the noisy masses at the time, plays a greater role than anything they did. (1958, 2: 198–199, no. 216)

Romanticism's critical anxiety is largely triggered by the hitherto inexperienced violent births in political and intellectual history. The observers cannot name the newborns. Furthermore, they are ill at ease at the sight of the Janus-faced progeny of the time. The French Revolution that represented the golden age of freedom and social justice for German intellectuals turned into a nightmare of dashed hopes with the French occupation. Kant's critical paradigm was both daunting and liberating and had to be revised to allow for a self-reflexive praxis. In the Athenäum Schlegel calls the French Revolution the "prototype [Urbild ] of revolutions," yet goes on to state that one could also regard it as "the most frightful grotesque of the age where the most deep-seated prejudices and their most brutal punishments are joined in a gruesome chaos and interwoven as bizarrely as possible with a colossal human tragicomedy" (ibid., 2: 248, no. 424). Faced with an unrepresentable chaos on the political and intellectual landscape, the Romantic mind initiates a discursive plan intent on inventing new paradigms of understanding and redefining the objectives of criticism and representation. This project, if one can call it such, is nevertheless neither self-avowedly innovative nor theoretical in a strict sense. The Jena Romantics see it as the creation of a "new mythology." The very term denotes the impulse to look for appropriate conceptual models in the past. The archaeology of these models in itself is not the major task; once found they need to be fragmented, realigned, and resynthesized in order to be conceptually useful in a new age. Novalis states that the problem of representation "needs, by all means, to be cast in another language" (1960, 2: 255, no. 477). The search for this language leads Romanticism to an investigation of the connections between literature and history as well as those between literary criticism and historiography.

In his dissertation, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The concept of art criticism in German Romanticism), Benjamin (1972–, 1.1: 51) observes that the words Kritik (critique,

criticism) and kritisch (critical) are the most frequently used philosophical and aesthetic expressions in the writings of early German Romantics. The word Darstellung (sensible or sensory representation) is probably a close second. In Romantic idealism, representation is often designated by three words, Darstellung, Vorstellung, and Repräsentation . Without attempting an etymological detour, I shall briefly examine the contextual use of these words in Romantic criticism. All point to the initial absence of what is being represented. However, in Romantic usage, only Darstellung attains to a materiality of figural representation. The concept of Darstellung, which rejects the imitative claims of mimesis and mimetic representation, appears with growing frequency in modern literary criticism beginning in the eighteenth century. In a well-documented study on the emergence of this term in the aesthetic discourse of eighteenth-century Germany and its definitive formulation in Schiller, Fritz Heuer (1970, 12–13) maintains that Darstellung distinguishes itself from existing notions of representation in its emphatic focus on poetic presence. Poetic representation is inextricably bound to the figural. Schlegel clearly invests the concept with a material form by stating that knowledge becomes knowledge only through Darstellung and that "poetry as Darstellung is knowledge and more than that" (1958, 18: 569, no. 84). Vorstellung, on the other hand, designates a latent metaphor or an image in the subject's mind. In "Gespräch über die Poesie" (Dialogue on poetry), Schlegel emphasizes the semantic distinction between the two words in an analogy to the distinction between inside and outside: "The inner vision [Vorstellung ] can become clearer to itself and quite alive only through external representation [Darstellung ]" (ibid., 2: 306). Finally, Novalis reserves the term Repräsentation for the act of making present in a material and visual but not necessarily poetic sense: "A thing becomes clear only through Repraesentation . One understands something most easily, when one sees it represented" (1960, 3: 246, no. 40). On the other hand, poetry "represents the unrepresentable" (stellt das Undarstellbare dar; ibid., 3: 685, no. 671).

Several important studies have investigated the function of the artistic or literary work as the representation of the idea(l) in early German Romanticism. Benjamin's Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, a prescient text that anticipates the contemporary theoretical interest in the problem of representation, ar-

gues that in early Romanticism the idea of form replaces the idea of the absolute. "The representational form" (Darstellungsform ) is the medium of the reflective function. It "reveals itself in criticism" and, in the final analysis, transforms itself "into an orderly continuum of forms" (1972–, 1.1: 88). The novel, which the Romantics called a Mischgedicht (mixed poem), represents a repertory of various genres and therefore embodies almost ideally the concept of this "continuum" (ibid., 1.1: 100). "The Romantic theory of the work of art," concludes Benjamin, "is the theory of its form" (ibid., 1.1: 72). The figural or representational form is simultaneously the medium of reflection and of knowledge—which is constituted in reflection. Representation is clearly no longer an inadequate repetition of the concept but a way of empowering reflection. In this sense, representation institutes critical praxis.

In The Literary Absolute Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy also investigate early Romanticism's indebtedness to idealistic philosophy. They maintain that Jena Romantics, most notably Friedrich Schlegel, define the status of literature as the representation of philosophy, as the aesthetic reflection on the concept. Like Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy maintain that the Romantics considered the work of literature to be inscribing onto itself the conditions of its own production and producing its own truth. What this means is that literature is neither purely literature nor simply literary theory. Rather it is literature that creates its own theory as it is being written. Schlegel and Novalis insist on this definition of the work of literature as a mode of critical self-reflection. Since literature produces its own truth, the literary form is ultimately the representation of the absolute. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, "Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute" (1988, 12). They argue that the Romantics reinvent literary form as the definitive equation between presence and representation, an operation that Kant left incomplete even in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of judgment).

Although the present study acknowledges a great debt to the insights of Benjamin and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it seeks to demonstrate that the "literary absolute" constitutes the very space where the problem of representation as mediation of presence becomes most visible in its irremediable ambiguity rather than to reaffirm that the Romantics elevated the literary to the absolute. After

all, the dominant figural forms (the arabesque and the fragment) and tropes (allegory and irony) of Romanticism are characterized by discontinuity, rupture, and indirect reference. Furthermore, the interest of this investigation lies ultimately not so much in the question of representation alone as in the relation of representation to the concepts of time and otherness.

Philosophy is based on the premise of absolute identity as in A = A, a proposition with which Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (The science of knowledge) starts.^[4] Absolute identity is fulfilled in self-consciousness where the subject and the object are one. In Fichte's philosophy, which, as Benjamin argues, provides the direct model for early Romanticism's work on representation, the self (Ich ) represents itself to itself by positing a not-self (Nicht-Ich ). Only the presence of the not-self validates the self. In reflection upon the not-self, the self sees its own presence as representation. Thus, identity always involves both a temporal (or diachronic) element, that is, the process of dividing and positing, and a synchronic one, which involves coexisting with difference. "The notion of the same captures the play of time and space by pointing to the representative character of all presence and every present and by underscoring the repetitiousness of all identity," writes philosopher Mark Taylor, "the same is not a simple identity; it is, rather, a 'structure of iterability' that includes both identity and difference" (1984, 48). It is only by embodying difference that identity fulfills its destiny. In fact, Jacques Derrida has argued that "just as . . . simple internal consciousness could not provide itself with time and with the absolute alterity of every instant without the irruption of the totally-other, so the ego cannot engender alterity within itself without encountering the Other" (1978, 94). This duplication of identity as difference and the concept of the doubling self are recurring motifs in Romantic writing. Since the self can represent itself only through the other, it is not surprising to see that Romantic discourse is populated by many others. Both Weimar Classicism and Jena Romanticism, for example, return to ancient Greece to uncover there an "archaeology" of themselves. Schlegel and Novalis add India and the Near East respectively to their historical-textual itinerary. Thus, representations of antiquity and the Orient are thinly veiled allegories of contemporary Germany. In other words, representations of otherness are self-representations. In a broader

analogous context, then, criticism is the self-representation of art or literature, fiction (Geschichten ) that of history (Geschichte ), and the past and the future that of the present.

In the history of Western philosophy being and time have always been intimately linked. Numerous treatises in the history of science and philosophy, among them Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and time), attest to the monumental human endeavor to grasp and analyze the relation of temporality to existence (1975, vol. 2). "Being has been consistently interpreted as presence and hence constantly regarded in terms of the present," observes Taylor, "to be is to be present, and to exist fully is to be present totally" (1984, 49). An understanding of the nature of time is perceived to be at the core of our understanding of the universe. However, scientists and philosophers have been perplexed in their efforts to postulate something on which time is dependent, through which the movement of time is possible but which, itself, is not a process. Isaac Newton saw time as absolute, flowing equably without reference to anything external. Yet process (or flow) and time are not identical. When the process stops, time does not. Heidegger has avoided treating time as a substance or entity. However, he invokes metaphors of motion and spatiality which suggest a flow where the self moves toward itself. And history, in Heidegger's account, does not capture the essence of time as a material entity but constitutes a representation of having-been-in-the-world.

If representation is a problem of mediating presence or being, then it is also a problem of presenting time. Time is just as elusive as being. Can time be re-presented? Or does it belong to the category of the unrepresentable? What is it, anyway? In a frequently quoted reference, St. Augustine said that if no one asked him the question, he knew; but if one required him to tell, he could not (Newton-Smith 1986, 24). In their book, Descartes' Dream, Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersch respond: "Two millennia later, two revolutions in physics later, we can still sympathize with this answer" (1987, 189). Richard P. Feynman, the late Nobel laureate in physics, once remarked that he would rather not be asked what time was, although physicists work with it every day. He felt it was just too difficult to think about (Boslough 1990, 109). Throughout most of history, time was seen as a flow, a linear movement. Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, however, represented time as a dimension, thus imparting meaning to the context and order of

events. There have been two conflicting views of time since antiquity. Parmenides and later Archimedes argued that time needed to be canceled or reduced to something like geometry. For Heraclitus and Aristotle the world could only be understood in its irreducible temporality. Augustine linked being to the present time. For the subject to exist meant to be present to itself, that is, to be coeval with itself.

In most philosophical debates, presentness seems crucial for an understanding of the notion of time. If the present moment were to be correctly identified, then the central metaphysical problem of time could be one vital step closer to a solution. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 424), for example, argues that although none of time's dimensions can be deduced from the rest, the present—in a broad sense, that is, the present enclosed by its horizons of the past and the future—is significant because it is the zone where being and consciousness coincide. However, the consciousness of the past in memory and the anticipation of future are always present in the present moment. In fact, Augustine views the present as consisting of three times: the past of present, the present of present, and the future of present. "The 'omnipresence' of past and future within the present uncovers an 'original' nonpresence at the very heart of the present," maintains Taylor, "past and future are not modalities of the present but signify irreducible absence. As identity possesses and is possessed by difference, so presence necessarily involves absence" (1984, 49). Such contradictions as the failure of identifying the present as the present or presence understood as absence, which lie at the heart of the problem of time, have led some thinkers to reject the reality of time.^[5] Events cannot be identified as past, present, and future in any essential sense; they can only be encoded as differentiated temporalities by being assigned mutually exclusive relational attributes.

It is difficult to challenge the refutations of the reality of time, since time is available to consciousness only in terms of human representation and not as objective reality, and since it has no external referent. In turn, representations of temporality take on the form of measurement of time by identifying some periodic uniformity, like the earth's revolution around the sun. In a comprehensive study of time, Errol E. Harris maintains that, in the final analysis, if the nature of time is to be understood at all, such understanding can only be found in a structure or principle that accounts for time in

and as a succession of change (1988, 37). Such accounts, to be sure, speak not of the essence of time but are representations or formal constructs. They are reconstructions of events that become temporal markers in the perpetual movement of time. In one of the numerous studies attempting to come to grips with the reality of time, Michael Shallis concedes that no scientific or philosophical inquiry can claim to discover the ultimate truth about time. The most any study can hope for, he maintains, is to identify how a particular culture's perception of time and how the prevalent assumptions of its scientific heritage affect and reflect its cosmology and are further explored in its scientific disciplines like physics and astronomy (1986, 63).

Obviously, this quick summary of a few selected speculations and articulations about the problem of time is meant to offer neither a systematic overview of nor a novel insight into one of the eternal mysteries of human experience. Rather, in keeping with Shallis's insight, I would like to investigate the perception of time in the context of a certain culture at a certain historical and philosophical juncture. The question to be addressed here is how the Romantic concern with representation involved the question of understanding time and history and how this involvement affected and is reflected in the philosophical, historical, and literary studies of German Romanticism. The concept of the full involvement of absolute being with time appears in various literary configurations in the texts of early Romanticism. These texts suggest that since no scientific principle or method can reveal the absolute or absolute time, the latter can only be indirectly understood through artistic representation. If being or essence is ineffable or unsayable except "allegorically," as Schlegel maintained, then time, which resists any form of direct representation, can only be understood or rather intuited as metamorphosis and metaphor. This assumes that all experience of time as memory (past), sensation (present), and anticipation (future) is lived and mediated through Vorstellung (imagination) and Darstellung . And it is this re-vision of the experience of temporality that is crucial for the inauguration of Romantic historiography, because it recognizes that the writing of history is predominantly the labor of aesthetic imagination.

In a certain sense, the tripartite structure of the Augustinian present offers a point of reference for the Romantic dilemma of representing the present. "All history is threefold," states Novalis,

"past, present, and future" (1960, 3: 372, no. 598). The time in which the Romantics find themselves resists any transparent understanding. The Judeo-Christian eschatology represented time as the unfolding of salvation history, culminating in a divine telos. The French Revolution subverted this notion by wiping out the hope of salvation. The Enlightenment's view of history as the progress of humanity was an inadequate model for an age faced with unpredictable failures along the way. How could this particular time be represented, made critically present to itself? And what about time in general? "The notion of a past whose meaning could not be thought in the form of a (past) present marks the impossible-unthinkable-unstatable not only for philosophy in general but even for a thought of being which would seek to take a step outside philosophy" (Derrida 1978, 132). The Romantic answer was to present the present as its other, that is, either as the past or the future. Schlegel maintains that "a limited representation merely based on the present does not exist in the human mind" (1958, 13: 231) and that "remembrance or memory and imagination are thoroughly indispensable" in the generation of concepts, for memory recalls past representations in consciousness and imagination anticipates the future (ibid., 13: 253). "All remembrance is the present," writes Novalis, and it appears as "a necessary pre-text of the poetic [nothwendige Vordichtung ]" (1960, 2: 559, no. 157). If memory provides the text of poetry and if poetry, as Novalis said, represents the unrepresentable then the past and future components of time, as transcendental entities, can only be available to consciousness through Darstellung . This, in turn, radically redefines methods of historiography. Ultimately, in early German Romanticism, the philosophical problem of representation reappears as the textual project of writing about time and history. The enduring product of this project is the recognition of poetic historiography as a legitimate disciplinary discourse.

If historiography is seen as a form of poetic representation, then it can participate in the rhetorical strategies reserved for literature. One of these is the art of "making strange" (befremden ). Novalis sees in all artistic undertaking the gesture of embracing the strange or the unknown: "The author or artist has an unknown [fremd ] purpose" (ibid., 3: 365, no. 571). "Making strange" often takes the form of exoticizing, that is, presenting something as distant in time or space. Thus, Romantic writing displays a predilection for

the representation of histories not available to recent memory. Romantic histories re-member fragments of distant pasts and foreign places and present them in the familiar form of poetic conventions. The textual revival of antiquity, the reconstructed literary memories of ancient Orient and Greece, and the reinvention of the Middle Ages as the symbol of a new national unity all constitute attempts to understand the self by understanding otherness or to understand the present by understanding the past. Making strange, distancing, and exoticizing are, paradoxically, poetic operations of making an other familiar.

In the act of "making strange" or poetization, otherness and history become coextensive with the self and the present, respectively. However, the historical flux generated by the French Revolution occults visions of the future and renders any unproblematic or linear projection of today into tomorrow impossible. In this sense, Romantic consciousness is a consciousness of radical temporality, that is, a continuum of disjunctive moments. In Delayed Endings Alice Kuzniar shows that Romantic visions of the future are informed by a strong sense of indeterminacy. Kuzniar focuses on strategies of describing the future by Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin and recognizes in their work the awareness of the difficulty in re-presenting something that was never present. Faced with this aporia, these writers indefinitely delay in language any vision of the apocalypse and hide it behind various figural strategies. Kuzniar locates the theoretical and historical context of such rhetorical ploys as narrative suspension and rupture in the unsettling aftermath of the French Revolution. The future can only be intimated in forms that mimic its uncertainty and discontinuity.

In his Jena lectures on transcendental philosophy (1800–1801), Schlegel singles out allegory as the trope of endlessness or endless consciousness which represents infinity in finite, sensory form (1958, 12: 3–43). Allegory fixes the reality that presents itself to consciousness in the form of images. The temporal progress of allegory toward absolute knowledge and its symbolic relation to it coincide with the concept of Bildung (educaiton, formation) in Romantic criticism. Bildung refers to the concept of the infinite perfectibility of the subject. "Allegory is nothing other than Bildung, " (ibid., 12: 40) states Schlegel. It is also "the appearance of the ideal" (ibid., 12: 19). In other words, just as Bildung is a progressive

approximation of the ideal, so is allegory that of infinity or of infinite and varying reality.

As a trope that negotiates analysis and synthesis, fragmentation and restoration (re-membering), allegory resembles memory. "The fruit of remembrance in every aspect is Geschichte [both history and story], and Geschichte of every sort is what lends our consciousness coherence and foundation" (ibid., 12: 402). In Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Heinrich of Ofterdingen), we are told that memory invests events with coherence and meaning through poetic reconfiguration. In a certain sense, then, the early Romantics prefigure Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who sees in the operations of memory the path to absolute knowledge. The Romantics went beyond Hegelian metaphysics by assigning the fragments of memory a distinctly material, albeit reinvented, history and form. Knowledge buried in memory could only be made present to consciousness by a machinery of formal representations. The search for artistic tools of representation and exotic icons of expression sends the Romantics on textual voyages to every corner of history. The expeditions to libraries, archives, museums, mausoleums, and ruins underline the Romantic desire to face the crisis of representation by creating a new mythology. This desire is also at the heart of the Romantics' encyclopedia project, an undertaking of colossal proportions which aimed to unearth, weld together, or reconstruct fragments of what was considered to have been a unified body of human knowledge.

Athenäum was not only the center for the collection of material for this universal encyclopedia but also the editorial collective that critiqued, revised, and rewrote Romanticism's cultural inheritance. In a sense Athenäum served as a combination library-laboratory where research centered around an examination of the socio-cultural crises that mark the end of the eighteenth century. Its editorial policy was a critique in the broader Kantian sense, an attempt to investigate the conditions of the production of epistemological, moral, and aesthetic values, their historical contingency and limits, and the reasons behind the bankruptcy of some of these values. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend, "literature or literary theory will be the privileged locus of expression" in this context (1988, 5). Literary criticism takes on the colossal task of holding up the mirror to an age in great need of self-reflection. The journal lasted

not quite two years, yet managed to rewrite the critical history of the vast period that preceded it. Although in the Romantic School, Heine somewhat unfairly criticizes the work of the Schlegel brothers for lacking a philosophical ground, it is, in fact, the common penchant for situating literature and criticism in a philosophical context that joins the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis in a close bond. Both Schlegel and Novalis double stitch their literary pieces with philosophical thread: "If one could establish the principles of poetry in the way our philosophical friend has tried to," says Lothario in Schlegel's "Dialogue on Poetry," "then the art of poetry would have a foundation lacking neither in solidity nor range" (1958, 2: 349). Novalis considered philosophy the theory of poetry. The rehabilitation of the problem of representation in Novalis and Schlegel is neither a merely disinterested exercise of imagination nor the ambitious and possibly self-indulgent attempt to finish the job philosophy left incomplete. The will to imagine the unimaginable and to represent the unrepresentable maps the path that takes Romanticism to a new frontier where the very foundation of accepted forms of knowledge is radically challenged.

"Philosophy's central concern," writes Richard Rorty, "is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all" (1979, 3). In the discourse of early Romanticism, these three degrees of representation are subsumed under symbolic representation. Under this rubric, texts were not tested for accuracy of representation, since they referred not to the natural world of essences or the noumenal world but to worlds that were accessible to us through other constructed images, words, and symbolic systems. Elsewhere Rorty sees the spirit of "nineteenth-century idealism" embodied in "twentieth-century textualism" (1982, 139–159). Philosophers of the last century, claims Rorty, believed only in the existence of ideas, while some critics in our century believe only in the existence of texts. Among these textualists Rorty names literary critics Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, post-structuralist French thinkers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historian Hayden White, and social scientist Paul Rabinow. Thanks to the work of the textualists, philosophy is presently reliving its past, albeit reincarnated as literary theory. By some error of the "spiritual sciences" (a literal translation of the German term Geisteswissenschaften, a

rough equivalent of the imprecise English term humanities ) the spirit of philosophy now inhabits the same body as its other, that is, the corpus of metaphor which it had previously shunned. Like many contemporary philosophers, Rorty is acutely aware of this corporeal colonization of philosophical territory by literary criticism. Although idealism is "a philosophical doctrine" and textualism is "an expression of suspicion about philosophy," they are united in their initiation of comparable paradigm shifts. Whereas idealism "wanted to substitute one sort of science (philosophy) for another (natural science) as the center of culture, twentieth-century textualism wants to place literature in the center, and to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres." In a similar vein, on the critical canvas of German Romanticism all knowledge is presented to consciousness through poetic representation. Indeed, Rorty sees Romanticism per se as "what unites metaphysical idealism and literary textualism" (ibid., 141–142).

The current status of philosophy in relation to literary theory emerged as a result of the conceptual blockbusting generated by the aporetic questions philosophy raised. It was, after all, philosophers who problematized the relations between sign and representation, meaning and intention, and self and the other. These dualities are the property of metaphysics, not of literature. Philosophical authority has traditionally tried to banish those rebels and trespassers known as free play, figuration, and connotation from the epistemologically stable land of analytic and scientific loyalties. Meanwhile, literary criticism has turned the tables on philosophy by showing that the latter has consistently relied on metaphors, analogies, fictional paradigms, rhetorical ploys, in short, all the stock in trade of literature in its quest for truth and certainty. Romanticism constitutes the first modern challenge to philosophy's denial of its textual and ultimately metaphorical condition. Schlegel refers to the mission of European philosophy as "the fruitless search for the highest knowledge " (1958, 19: 20, no. 180; the emphasis is Schlegel's). The seeds of Romantic discontent about philosophical certainty come to full fruition in Nietzsche who embodies the textual interlinkage between early German Romanticism and late modernity. Such conceptual figures as free play, connotation, diversity, and chaos, which have all along inhabited the margins of German Idealistic philosophy and provided alternative terms for reason, unity, presence, or some other first principle, constitute the

regulative metaphors of contemporary literary theory. The material "reality" of figural representation took its radical leap to the center of critical attention in early German Romanticism. The concept of free play of cognitive faculties not restricted to a definite conceptual rule was first formulated in the context of German Idealism by Kant in an attempt to define the status of aesthetic judgment. In Kant's schema, aesthetic understanding is realized in the free play of the mind's signifying capacity. Here imagination freely synthesizes the manifold of intuition and understanding to form a universally communicable judgment. Schiller translates the notions of free play and representation into strictly aesthetic terms. This new aesthetic, in turn, forms the basis of modern Bildung, which literally means (form)ation or figuration. And in early Romanticism, form and figure literally constitute the body of the work of art. In other words, the literary work becomes the embodiment or sensory representation of knowledge.

Thus, in an effort to link the conceptual history of early Romanticism to the larger cultural project of modernity, the Romantic paradigms of representation, temporality, and alterity will be studied in the larger context of German Idealism. This will involve a reexamination of the writings of Kant, Fichte, and Schiller in Romantic terms. A brief discussion of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics shows how his project complements Schlegel's and Novalis's views on linguistic representation. Although Schelling figures prominently in the Romantic discourse on representation, I do not go into a detailed discussion of his role, since in his work the problematic status of representation reaches a closure. In the final analysis, artistic representation becomes identical with reality and philosophy, therefore, culminates in art. In Schlegel and Novalis, however, the energy of the crisis of understanding is sustained. This is what ultimately makes their work more relevant to modern critical consciousness. It is probably correct to state that the fine line of distinction or continuation between modern and postmodern discourse can be understood in terms of a transition from a fascination with representation to a problematic confrontation with it. In The Postmodern Condition, for example, Jean-François Lyotard maintains that the production and distribution of information in the modern era was controlled by "metanarratives." These were a set of stories of a mythological or rational nature which represented authoritative accounts of the growth of knowledge and culture. The challenge

to the legitimacy of these representations as unifying forces of cultural history culminated in the postmodern critique of knowledge. Postmodern knowledge is represented as a language game. The goal of the game, where participation takes the form of speaking and writing, is an ongoing reconceptualization of cultural accounts. The Romantic crisis of representation and postmodern language games provide a pre-text and a postscript, respectively, to Nietzsche's provocative views on language and representation, which will be discussed in detail in the final chapter. Nietzsche becomes the ultimate point of reference and reverence in the story of modern critical pilgrimages. His own story makes sense only when read in the larger context of his Romantic predecessors' history. They, like Nietzsche, had taken the representational conceit of traditional metaphysics to task. This story needs to be read sequentially (historically) as well as synchronically (in relation to its current methodical implications), in just the way Nietzsche himself read the story of Greek tragedy.

The process of Bildung in its broadest sense as formation, education, and diversification, that is, as the move from a unified subjectivity to the multiplicity of experience, finds its concrete expression in the novels and novellas of German Romanticism. "A classical text must never be entirely understood," remarks Schlegel, "but those who are cultivated [gebildet ] and who cultivate themselves [sich bilden ] must always want to learn more from it" (1958, 2: 149, no. 20). For Schlegel, a classical text is not a work defined by strictly aesthetic, generic, or historical criteria but an intertextual body.^[6] It refers not only to other books but also to works of art, systems of thought, and social norms and practices. The process of Bildung, then, is an act of formation whose product is a text, which can take on the form of a history, an encyclopedia, or a novel. In other words, it always embodies the spirit of Romantic poesy (romantische Poesie ), which is a free combination or association of forms and genres. Schlegel observes, for example, that exemplary novels are often "compendia" or "encyclopedias" of the intellectual life of an outstanding individual. Even if such a life story were to be written in a genre other than the novel, such as drama, the result would still be a novel (ibid., 2: 156, no. 78). In the literary tales of Novalis, Hölderlin, and Arnim, which we shall read with an eye on this pedagogical imperative, the concepts of Romantic idealism leave the domain of abstract thought and take on life in the "prac-

tical" world of fiction. Philosophy and pedagogical fictions are engaged in a dialectical exchange.

Poetic narratives lend philosophy a compelling presence, and philosophy, in turn, compensates for the absences or gaps in Bildung and, by implication, in poetry. "Philosophy must correct the mistakes of our education," states Novalis, "otherwise, we wouldn't need it" (1960, 2: 155, no. 132). Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Hölderlin's Hyperion are in a sense Bildungsromane . In each, the hero embarks upon a quest for self-knowledge that comes as a result of encounters with the other. The other takes on the form of another time, place, and culture; it is the exoticized other. In each case the protagonist reinvents himself in a new mode of self-representation that is only a veiled representation or an allegory of alterity. The ultimate encounters with the exotic are perhaps most vividly exemplified in Achim von Arnim's novella Isabella von Ägypten (Isabella of Egypt). Here, all conventional knowledge about nature, history, and geography is subverted, fragmented, and reconfigured in imagination. The result is, as Schlegel would have said, an allegory of allegory. All three texts enact their allegorical stories through reduplicated narratives of their own critical tasks. The allegorical and contingent claims of these tales are subjected to critical analysis not to seal them in their own image but to open them to reinterpretation and reintegration into our modern literary sensibilities.

Our present institutions of criticism see themselves as facing another crisis of representation. Although deconstruction has provided the impetus for a reevaluation of all values in literary theory, it has also become locked in the toils of an endless demystification constantly raising doubts about its own methods. It has pushed the limits of all forms of understanding by its relentless demonstration of how language collapses under the strain of its own contradictory (or metaphorical) logic. To be sure, the recognition that philosophical language hides its defects behind a rhetorical veil is an important critical insight. However, as a mere diagnostic insight, it lacks any feasible conceptual mechanism to adequately differentiate the various ideological underpinnings of discourses controlled by the contingencies of temporality and alterity. By looking back at moments of conceptual blockbusting in the history of ideas we may be able to look beyond the present conflict and crisis. Perhaps deconstruc-

tion needs to relive its past through the restless spirit of Romanticism to exorcise its demons.

The present study aims at two related objectives. It hopes to reclaim for contemporary literary theory important critical concepts of an intellectual history that has been eclipsed either by fashionable jargon or buried by prejudice against the German Idealistic tradition that is often perceived as too abstruse, dense, or Teutonic. The dichotomy between Anglo-American and German critical positions has traditionally been informed by misunderstandings and a mutual sense of distrust, interrupted by rare moments of genuine exchange. The drift has become more pronounced in contemporary criticism, since, as Geoffrey Hartman points out, "Anglo-American critics did not see through French culture to German lines of thought" (1980, 44). The interdisciplinary orientation of the present account may render more accessible a discourse that has been conveniently long forgotten and whose critical rigor can direct our current intellectual curiosity into fruitful lines of inquiry. The study also aims for a critical relinking of questions raised by our modernity with a vital cultural legacy. It recalls and partially recovers forgotten strategies of understanding in order to more clearly reformulate modern critical concerns. Of course, conceptual explosions do not come about in the suspended tranquility of a space beyond time. Therefore, without venturing into the domain of Ideologiekritik (critique of ideology), I have tried to suggest that the preoccupation with representations of time and otherness in German Romanticism is linked to an ideology of adventure, of repossessing another time and space in the quest for self-identity. The nostalgia of Romanticism can border on a form of self-worship through veneration of relics associated with its own development. Or such nostalgia can be a vital link to a history facing the threat of being forgotten. For the Romantics, a history eaten away in time by forgetting amounts to death, that is, the loss of being in time.

My own project of writing this study is caught in the paradox of attempting to impose a certain structure and closure on what apparently resists closure. I realize I faced the rather ironic challenge of systematizing critically astute but fragmentary texts that resist any notion of systematic closure. The temptation to write a fragmentary text composed only of quotations, as Benjamin once intended to do, was great. However, the constraints of academic

writing made this impossible. In spite of the formal closure, that is, a final sentence on the last page, this work remains, in the Romantic spirit which it has attempted to represent, a fragment of sorts, an incomplete commentary which will hopefully challenge others to fill in its gaps. I have tried to identify one significant critical question, that of representation, as it was defined by German Romanticism and as it defined German Romanticism, and attempted to synthesize its historical, theoretical, and literary implications. This book itself is only a representation and, as such, subject to losses in the form of gaps between historical "facts" and their interpretation and between the established critical value of works studied and their reconfiguration in theoretical imagination. In an apt and witty formulation, critic W. J. T. Mitchell summarizes the problem of representation as the reversal of "the traditional slogan of the American Revolution: instead of 'No taxation without representation,' no representation without taxation. Every representation exacts some cost, in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth" (1990, 21). Against these odds, I have tried to suggest something of the richness and complexity of the history of a critical discourse which has managed in record time to reconceptualize the discipline of literature. Finally, the progress of the present account of Romanticism's fortunes is not in the direction of a telos. Rather our story is one more testimony to Benjamin's insightful observation that in the course of its history, philosophy has always been "a struggle for the representation of a small number of words which are always the same—of ideas" (1972–, 1.1: 217).